My (26F) boyfriend (32M) has a problem with texting sex workers. Is this something we can work through?

My boyfriend and I have dated before. We dated for 2 years, about 5 years ago. We broke up because he cheated on me. He could be a very emotionally avoidant person, and there were loud of stress factors in his life at the time. I’m not excusing his cheating, but I do understand that he was younger, he was stressed, and he just made a poor choice. Fast forward to now, over the past 5 years, he’s made it clear to me that he wants to be together again. A few months after we broke up, he and I discussed the whole breakdown of our relationship. We were both very open and honest, both taking accountability for our own parts. At the time, I just felt like I didn’t love him anymore. We were cordial, and share a lot of the same friends. A year later, he tried again to make things work, and I still wasn’t interested and he accepted that. I dated somebody else, and we stopped talking after that with the occasional friendly check in. (I’ve since ended that relationship.) This past summer, my ex came to my hometown to visit and we eventually decided to give things another go. This wasn’t a decision I made lightly. I’ve known from his friends, family, especially his best friends and mother, how much he still wanted us to be together. We had discussions and I’ve truly seen a huge change in him. He’s a lot more open. He’s been emotionally present. I really feel like he’s made me a priority. We get along day to day, we laugh, we’re affectionate. People even comment on what a great dynamic we have, and I’ve agreed. My boyfriend is a commercial diver, and his job is very labor intensive and dangerous. On the 2nd of this month, his company started doing a dredge job. This means 7 days a week, 12-14 hour days, mostly underwater in the cold, and this will be 8 weeks long. I know he’s exhausted. I’ve worked 70+ hour weeks before, but not in manual labor, so I can only imagine. The problem started when we went to meet a friend for his birthday. I could tell my boyfriend was hungry and tired and in a mood (he rarely is in a bad mood) so we didn’t chat on the way to the restaurant. Things were fine when we got there, so I chalked it up to him being hangry. When we got back in the car, his weird attitude came back. I had asked him if he was alright a few times, he said he was tired, but I kept pushing and he said, “everyday is a problem with you.” In retrospect, I really want to make it clear that I kept bugging him about his attitude (just being quiet), but I feel like this is a moment where I should’ve just picked my battle. If I could show you the scene through a crystal ball, I think most would agree that I should’ve just let it go. Especially since I know of his stress, I dive as well (recreationally), I know he’s worn out and wanting peace at home. And again, he’s a usually happy go lucky kind of guy. I didn’t say anything else to him, and we went to bed. The next day he tried to talk about it, but I was not really being as open as I should’ve been. I can be quite sensitive and reactive to any sort of criticism from a partner, which is something I’m working on. But I stayed defensive and upset with him for days, I followed him around and wouldn’t let the conversation die, and I wouldn’t accept any of his answers. It’s kind of like I kept following him and pushing him, giving him a no win situation, and get mad when he’s just over it and I chalk that up to “he doesn’t care.” Then I cry. My mother was extremely emotionally abusive, so sometimes I fall into a very victim mindset, and sometimes I get reactive and hypersensitive to perceived threats of “I don’t love you,” even when I rationally know that I’m being too emotional and impossible. I know this about myself, it’s something I’m working on. Anyways, during this days long fight, he did try a few times to resolve it, but him being a man of few words and me needing a monologue about how he loves me to right the wrong, it just wasn’t happening. He said he couldn’t handle it, and we broke up. A few nights ago, I looked through his phone. He had texted a few phone numbers saying, “available.” Some responded, some didn’t. He never responded after his first initial text. I googled the numbers and they were from an escort website. I looked back a few weeks and he’d done it one other time when I first got here and I was pouting all night in our bedroom. He told me that when he was single and doing freelance work, traveling all the time and working all the time, it’s just something he discovered that was an easy release, and didn’t take any emotional energy on his end. He said that he’s not done it since we got back together, he’s ashamed of it, and he doesn’t know why he can’t stop looking at the website. I don’t know what to make of this. A part of me feels like it’s cheating, and just a slippery slope into being physically cheated on. Another part of me understands that maybe it was just an easy go to for him, and it’s been hard to break the habit of checking the site. He said it’s like a porn addiction. I feel like I’m caught between wanting to be there for him and understand him and not judge, and also between protecting myself and seeing this as a huge red flag. He is the kind of person who thrives on self improvement. He is a good hearted guy, and he does work on himself. Was this just an invasion of privacy on my end, and something private I should’ve left alone (this isn’t what he said, just my own mind running.) do I understand him as a human and give grace?